Can A Podcast Help Radio Sound More 'Live & Local?'

I've teamed up with Detroit comedian Mike Geeter to launch a new podcast about the Detroit arts and entertainment scene called The D Brief. In this column, I'm sharing the lessons I learn from it for other radio broadcasters who want to do the same.

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When I speak about podcasting at radio conferences across the country, I explain to broadcasters that podcasts require a different approach than creating great radio. On the radio, you want to talk about topics with broad appeal to a wide range of listeners: a mix of breaks about the upcoming football game, Kim Kardashian, and the latest Marvel superhero movie.

With podcasts, you have the freedom to focus on a specific niche, such as craft beer, or board games, or knitting. That's because radio stations broadcast through transmitters that limit them to a specific geographic area. To reach a large enough audience to achieve their ratings goals, they must take on topics that will appeal to lots of people within a single region.

Podcasts, on the other hand, do not have distribution that's limited by geography. There may not be enough people to support an all-chess radio show in Topeka, but a chess podcast could draw a significant worldwide audience.

In short, podcasts should own a niche subject, while radio stations should not, because they are already confined by two niches: geography and format.

Many stations aspire to create program content that is "live and local." Some do a better job than others, which have fallen back on voicetracking and syndication.

But here's a thought...

Can podcasts adoptthat "live & local" ethos? What if a podcast selected a place - such as Denver or Hawaii or Napa Valley - as its niche?

What does a "live and local" podcast sound like?

For starters, it certainly wouldn't be live -- podcasts are pre-recorded, not broadcast in real time. However, podcasts can still be timely. While the content of Serial and WTF are fairly evergreen, the content of Pod Save America is largely ephemeral. A podcast that doesn't require weeks or months to produce a single episode but could be produced quickly, like a radio show, could be "live enough."

As for "local," that's pretty straight-forward: The podcast can focus on things happening in a specific area. Or even a niche within a local market, like public radio station WAMU's podcast series called "Metropocalypse" - a series devoted to the D.C. Metro and its millions of riders each and every week.

When we launched our podcast The D Brief here in Detroit, my co-host, comedian Michael Geeter, and I chose to focus specifically on arts and entertainment in Detroit because it's both broad enough to hold our interest from week to week, but focused enough to give the podcast a clear direction. Plus, it matches our skill set as entertainers rather than journalists.

Mike and I made a list of key topic areas we thought would be interesting and came up with this list:

1. Music
2. Sports
3. Comedy
4. Theater
5. Films
6. Food and drink
7. Festivals and events

Each episode would have sixteen segments (see my last column) and cover these topic areas. With that in mind, some of these segments became easy to envision as lists, much like a "Concert Calendar" feature on a radio station.

We would apply this list format to sporting events, stand-up comedy shows, theater performances, and movies. But you can't really cover restaurants and bars with a list. And what do you do with one-off events that don't fit neatly into one of these categories, like The Dream Cruise or Sweetest Day? Plus, we wanted to conduct interviews as part of the show.

After giving it a lot of thought, we developed a 16-break show structure that looks like this:

1. Intro to set up the show
2. 5 standard "List" segments for Concerts, Sports, Comedy, Theater, and Movies
3. 3 "In-Depth" segments that allow us to focus on a single event or news story
4. 2 live in-person interviews comprised of three segments each: the first and third focus on the guest, while the middle would be List or In-Depth segments that allows the guests to add to the discussion
5. 2 live-to-tape interviews, featuring highlights from interviews recorded in the field during the week and played back during the podcast taping
6. Conclusion to wrap up the show

We felt that this structure would give us enough direction but also provide enough flexibility to be creative. The order of the segments could change from week to week, and if a segment wasn't working, we could simply replace it without having to retool the entire show.

Most importantly, the structure would enable us to showcase what's happening in Detroit in a way that feels "live and local."

Past Columns:

1. A Show Structure for Podcasts and Radio?
2. Why Podcasts Need Structure
3. Hard Podcasting Lessons for Radio Broadcasters